I’ve spent a great deal of space and effort on this series of articles, trying to convince people that our elections have been systematically stolen during the last couple of decades.

I do not feel embarrassed or intimidated by those who call me a “conspiracy theorist” for these efforts.Those people fall into two general groups.One is those who don’t have a good understanding of the specific issues, but simply believe that anyone who refuses to accept the version of reality espoused by our government or our national news media is a “conspiracy theorist.”The other is people of wealth and power who do understand those issues and have a strong vested interest in maintaining the status quo, especially with regard to our badly corrupted election system.

The reason that I try so hard to convince people that our elections have been systematically stolen during this century is that I believe that we desperately need to revamp our election system. I Believe that an awareness that our elections are being systematically stolen might spur the American people to action.

But a belief that our elections have been systematically stolen should not even be necessary prior to taking vigorous action to improve our election system.All that should be necessary is a strong belief in democracy, an awareness of some very basic principles of what a Democracy is, and an awareness of the great extent to which those principles have been vastly compromised with regard to the current state of our election system.Specifically, I believe that all Americans should understand the following simple concepts about what an election system should be in a Democracy.

Vote counts must be verifiableThat is, we cannot entrust the counting of our votes to individuals or corporations, using computers or any other means that produce results that cannot be verified.Being verifiable means that the votes must be available in a physical form -- not just on a computer, which can be programmed to miscount the votes.

There must be a solid verification process in place, to be used whenever elections produce controversial results, regardless of how large the margin of victory is

Having a verifiable system in place is of no value whatsoever if it isn’t used.There have been many very high profile national elections this century which evidence strongly suggest were stolen, and yet in every case where a full and properly conducted recount (i.e. hand recount of paper ballots) should have resolved the issue, all efforts for verification were successfully blocked.

The blocking of efforts to verify the integrity of our elections takes many forms.We have seen that the cost of having a statewide hand recount of the vote is sometimes jacked up by several million dollars as a means of obstructing recounts.Individual citizens should not have the responsibility for raising money to pay for a recount.Recounts should be built into the system, and the cost, which should be minimal especially if public volunteers are willing to donate their time, should be borne by the government.

Any American citizen, not just the losing candidates, should have legal standing to request a recount.The right to a fair election is the most basic requirement of democracy.We all have a great stake in that.

Individual counties or states should have no legal right to refuse to do a recount.Recounts must be done by hand, using paper ballots, rather than by machines, because if a machine was programmed to steal votes during the election it is likely that it will do the same thing during the recount.If an election Is stolen, nobody can tell ahead of time where it was stolen.It may have been stolen in a small handful of counties or even a single county.If so, and if individual counties have the right to refuse to do a full hand recount of paper ballots, undoubtedly it will be those counties where the vote was stolen which will probably be the ones that refuse to do the recount.

We have seen that recounts are often obstructed when the voting machine corporations, with the help of election officials, disobey state law by finding various ways to force the recount to match the voting machine’s original count.Yet there are hardly ever any adverse consequences for this criminal behavior.State laws must be directed towards ensuring that recounts are done honestly, and failures to obey those laws must not be tolerated.

Elections are a public, not a private matterTo the extent that private individuals or corporations have any role to play in our elections at all, they have no right whatsoever to restrict the public from examining any and all evidence pertaining to the counting of our votes, before, during or after elections.The fact that in a nation that calls itself a Democracy, we have allowed private corporations (usually with obvious vested interests in the outcome of the elections) to count our votes and then successfully restrict the public from examining evidence that could help to resolve questions about the integrity of the election, is absurd.Any of our elected representatives who have contributed to this should be ashamed of themselves, and they should be removed from office.

The integrity of our elections is the most important issue facing the American people todayAs noted earlier in this series the United States has been ranked dead last among the world’s Western democracies in the integrity of its election system.This constitutes a huge blot on our Democracy.Every other issue of importance to the American people depends upon it.

These are general principles, not rocket science.They should be obvious to all Americans who are concerned with the preservation of their Democracy.

The most secure voting system to prevent electronic manipulation of our vote is one where all counting of votes is done by hand rather than by machine.I say that because the process of ensuring that machines count our votes honestly is complicated, with many opportunities for failure.For example, the corporation whose voting machines have in recent years been the most frequently used in our country, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), recently was forced to admit that for several years they installed remote access software on machines that they sold to their customers -- a process that facilitates vote count rigging even while an election is in process.As of yet, they have refused to answer many questions about this, such as who they sold these machines to.This raises so many questions:Why did this go undetected for so long?How do we know that ES&S or other manufacturers are not continuing to do this?For what purpose did they do this, and why did they lie about it when first asked?How many elections were enabled to be stolen because of this? How can we ensure that this never happens again?

Most European countries have recognized the perils of vote counting by machine, and consequently, most of Europe early in the 21st Century turned to hand counting of paper ballots.But if switching to a system where all votes are counted by hand proves to be politically unfeasible in the United States, it is mandatory that at least the above noted general principles be put securely in place.

I will conclude this series with a quote from Milton Mayer, who studied the thinking of ordinary lower level Nazis during Hitler’s rise to power.Mayer explained in his book, “They Thought they Were Free -- The Germans 1933-45,” the gradual process by which the Germans gave up their freedom to Hitler:

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information that the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen the gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes.And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."

"You can see how easy it was, then, not to think of fundamental things.One had no time."

"You speak privately to your colleagues ... but what do they say?They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things' or 'You’re an alarmist' … And you can’t prove it."

"In between comes all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next… You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago."

Don’t fool yourself into believing that Mayer’s thoughts on this issue can apply to Germans but not to Americans because we are better than they were.The issue that Mayer talks about here involves human nature, not specifically German nature. World history is full of such examples.

The corruption of our voting system involves such basic principles that all Americans who are concerned about the survival of our Democracy should see it by now.Yet most Americans do not see it, do not even know about it, are unconcerned about it, or accept the bland and deceitful assurances that they receive from their government and their national corporate news media.

The people of the United States must make an effort to see what’s going on, and demand that our government clean up our corrupted election system to be consistent with the simple and basic principles of Democracy discussed above.Until and unless they do, our Democracy has little if any chance of surviving.

Dale Tavris has worked as a public health physician/epidemiologist for 40 years, with state departments of public health, the U.S. Air Force, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and the Food and Drug Administration. In that capacity, he has authored 39 publications in peer-reviewed medical or public health journals.

Since 2004 he has been actively involved in the national election reform movement, serving in a volunteer capacity with the Election Defense Alliance for a few years as their data coordinator.

He has written dozens of online articles about election fraud. In 2007 he co-authored a journal article on election fraud: “Fingerprints of Election Theft: Were Competitive Contests Targeted.”

Tavris has written and published three books, including two of a political nature: “The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream: The Widening Gap between the Reality of the United States and its Highest Ideals,” 2011; and “Democracy Undone: Unequal Representation, the Threat to our Election System, and the Impending Demise of American Democracy,” 2012.